Theatres must look beyond their regular audiences and to society itself

It’s time for theatres to ask some hard questions about their impact on people who have never even seen one of their shows

Camelot: The Shining City, a co-production between Slung Low and Sheffield People’s Theatre. Slung Low’s Alan Lane says: ‘I want our theatres to be seen as belonging to all the parts of society.’
Photograph: Mark Douet

Some years ago I left the National Theatre having seen Fiona Shaw in Brecht’s The Good Person of Sichuan. I was in a stream of people heading to Waterloo Station and we all passed two young homeless lads asking for money. Despite what we had just watched on stage, not a single one of us stopped and gave.

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Of course it would be naive to think that seeing a play makes you a better person. If that was true then we critics who go to the theatre almost every night would be paragons of virtue. Seeing Good Person or maybe An Inspector Calls may make you think and modify your behaviour, at least temporarily, just as King Lear may make you think twice about your will and Hedda Gabler lead you to doubt the wisdom of having firearms in the house.

Every theatregoer has an example of a play that changed their life to a greater or lesser extent. However, the real question I reckon theatres need to ask themselves is not whether what they do impacts on those who go to their shows but whether what goes on in their building really has a significant impact for those who have never stepped inside it? This is not about an individual’s response and relationship to a particular show in a particular building, but about a play and a venue’s relationship to the community at large.

If, in the race to survive, theatres don’t really consider ​their changing place in society​ then what’s the point?

This means addressing some really hard questions about the function of our theatres and their purpose in the 21st century. What does it mean to put on The Good Person of Sichuan in an area with a high number of rough sleepers? How might a regional theatre reflect upon what goes on inside its walls when a tented village has sprung up in the square outside? How does an artistic director putting on a dinner jacket to go and charm potential sponsors square that with theatre’s everyday work and the shows it produces that are often in opposition to the values and aims of capitalism? As Rebecca Atkinson-Lord recently observed here on the blog: “In our hurry to compensate for the reductions in state funding over the past few years, have we truly considered the implications of this new entrepreneurial arts ecology?... It is now normal to see corporate brand identities stamped across our cultural institutions.”

Back in 2014 Diane Ragsdale made a significant speech to the Clore Leadership programme in which she

posed the question: Do theatres want to be country clubs? Or do they want to be civil institutions? If it’s the latter, that means that instead of seeing their own survival as paramount, they must understand the role they can play as enablers and collaborators working with the whole community. Ragsdale quotes from Mark Ravenhill’s Edinburgh fringe 2013 launch speech in which he declared:

Mark Ravenhill: So we’re the best friends of the super-rich and the most disadvantaged at the same time? Photograph: Ondrej Nemec/isifa/Getty Images

“I think the message in the last couple of decades has been very mixed, in many ways downright confusing: we are a place that offers luxury, go-on-spoil-yourself evenings where in new buildings paid for by a national lottery (a voluntary regressive tax) you can mingle with our wealthy donors and sponsors from the corporate sector and treat yourself to that extra glass of champagne but we are also a place that cares deeply about social justice and exclusion as the wonderful work of our outreach and education teams show. So we’re the best friends of the super-rich and the most disadvantaged at the same time? That’s a confusing message and the public has been smelling a rat. If the arts are for something, who are they for? And what are they doing for them?”

That’s the nub of the matter. If, in the race to survive, theatres don’t really consider their changing place in society, what their purpose is in a very different world from the one they operated in just a decade ago, and how they can collaborate with others to add value to that purpose, then what’s the point? If a theatre’s mission has become selling more tickets, more growth, empire-building or simple self-preservation, then that is a theatre that has lost the plot.

Consider this long but pertinent quote from Alan Lane’s blog on the Slung Low website.

“I’ve been in a number of meetings recently where really clever people have asked what are our regional theatres for? And really clever people have answered with points about skills development, about mixed income streams and about ensuring a national spread of live entertainment. It’s been a while since I heard anyone talk spiritedly about the changes in society that a relevant theatre can support. In the crisis currently facing the arts there is an opportunity to redefine what our theatres are for. I want a publicly owned system that places the audience in a different relationship with theatre-going beyond customer. I want a theatre network that offers inspiring, provoking live entertainment to all members of society regardless of their financial situation. I want our theatres to offer small places of sanctuary to our communities that are being beaten back by the forces of both national austerity and global economics. I want our theatres to be seen as belonging to all the parts of society, passionately held as resources of the common weal not to be buggered about with by politicians. Like our schools, like our GPs, like our television channels, like our National Parks.”